COLDCUT: Ninja Tune

Innovative musicians, DJs, entrepreneurs, technology intellectuals, artists...Jonathan More and Matt Black mix up more than just records to make Coldcut. Derek Johnson & Debbie Poyser meet up with the Ninjas to talk zentertainment and audiosyncrasies...

It's the middle of a sweltering afternoon in the hottest August in living memory as we wait for our appointment with two of the coolest figures in the recent history of popular music. Matt Black and Jonathan More, collectively Coldcut, are only slightly late for the 3pm SOS interview, having just completed a telephone interview with an overseas magazine. We slouch on the funky skip‑salvaged furniture of their sunny London warehouse premises, while they stretch out on the scruffy wooden floor in front of a pair of loading doors, opened wide to encourage the sluggish air to circulate.

Elsewhere in the informal suite of rooms, staff are administering the record label and zentertainment empire which is Coldcut's Ninja Tune, an outlet not only for Coldcut but for other artists they've signed to the label. We're here to talk about the release of two new Coldcut records, Let Us Play and More Beats & Pieces, the latter marking the 10th anniversary of Coldcut's seminal cut‑up single Beats & Pieces. For the More Beats & Pieces project, Coldcut pressed up 30 copies of a vinyl album containing audio material sourced by themselves, and distributed them amongst fellow musicians/DJs, to do with more or less as they wished. The raw material, says Matt Black, was "influenced by the stuff that we had on the initial Beats & Pieces, so most of the drum breaks were evolved from the original loop, which was a sped‑up 'When the Levee Breaks' by Led Zeppelin. But I've always felt that break could be a lot heavier, and with [drummer] Paul Brook, the guy we work with, we sorted it; by amplifying certain beats of it and cutting it up, we made it a lot heavier. We recycled it."

The musicians chosen to contribute to the album were, according to Jonathan More, "people we were into; like Tortoise, we've been into their shit, met them in Chicago; Kid Koala, we've signed him to the label, met him in Canada when we were DJ'ing over there; Strictly Kev, DJ Food and Ollie the Herbaliser." Matt: "We go for people we respect, not people liable to sell a lot of records for us. Big record companies just use remixes as a marketing tool, and they just get in whoever's tart of the week to do it. You could say that we're no different, except that our level of assessing who's cool at the moment is much more rarified, and we actually know these guys. It's a different issue, really, because with remixes as a marketing tool, an artist on a major label just has their stuff given away to whatever old tart is in town, and the artist pays for the privilege... there's no choice. It's happened to us — we were mugged by the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and it's not very funny. But if it's the artist choosing it, saying 'here's some stuff of mine, I just want you to do an interpretation...' The term remix is awful anyway; version is better."

The revisiting of Beats & Pieces, in the shape of MB&P, is much more than a marketing exercise. It's more like Coldcut's way of celebrating the vinyl cutup techniques that went into producing the original release — and starting to bid a fond farewell to them. Matt Black: "With More Beats & Pieces, the sound is what you get with direct vinyl manipulation. That kind of chopped, extremely aggressive, analogue manipulation is something that you can't actually get by any other means. We love vinyl, and we love scratching, but vinyl isn't actually going to make it. Sad as it is, we're going to have to wave goodbye to that, and it's going to become increasingly a specialist preserve. To stay alive, we've got to move beyond that or die out like some prehistoric animal. It's like yin and yang: analogue/digital, scratching/hard disk recording... It's by balancing those things that you'll achieve longevity, I think. Shops aren't going to stock vinyl any more, though it's lasted a lot longer than a lot of people thought, mainly due to the dance market. But I think I'll be on a fairly safe bet if I say that in 100 years time there won't be any 12‑inches produced! We're celebrating where we've actually got to — not just us, but the DJ fraternity — in terms of what can be done with fucking around with sound using decks, but at the same time we're sort of starting to say farewell to that, looking to the future and seeing if our skills can be kept alive and evolved using other technology. We think they can, and that's the idea of the Digital Jockey... A DJ plays with recorded sound; a Digital Jockey is the same, except with recorded data, which can be sound, or anything else."

That's Zentertainment

Talk of the Digital Jockey brings us neatly to Let Us Play, the other new release we're here to discuss. Even the title hints at the Coldcut philosophy: let's play — but let's play seriously; let's put something in and get something out. They call it 'zentertainment'. So what is it? Matt: "Zentertainment... it's another new word when we'd promised not to make up any more words". Jonathan: "Entertainment is a major market: is that all it is? Is it just a commodity? Or is it possible to mix it with other things, because we like mixing things up. If you mixed it up with ideas of interactivity, and DIY culture and information, and call it zentertainment..."

The excellent Mac and PC CD‑ROM given away with Let Us Play encapsulates the zentertainment idea (and gives an A‑Z of other words Coldcut have made up...): the music is there, but mixed in with it is the innovative use of video and visuals that's been such a large part of Coldcut's fruitful partnership with Hex multimedia, plus a Ninja Knowledge quiz and some fun interactive software tools. These include My Little Funkit, a "DIY DJ toy" whose three banks of loops can be used to remix Coldcut, and Playtime, a "beat‑based algorithmic music generator." The CD‑ROM also features an information archive called Infobone, in which the pair enlarge on the philosophy they seem to live by. Which is? As far as you might make it out: stay independent, be active, make music, provide a catalyst for new forms of expression, bring people together, be political, develop new musical tools, "work to live, not to eat, experiment with new structures. Consider an example of an alternative mentality to organisation. Navigate a path on the scenic route."

Anyone taking a peek at Infobone will also discern the traces of Coldcut's own bad times within the record industry ("near‑death experiences with Big Life and Arista"), following their pop success with such artists as Lisa Stansfield and Yazz. For anyone not familiar with this period, Jonathan More enlarges, a little reluctantly: "I don't want to spend all day lunching out on this because we've lunched out on it a lot. Basically, they [Big Life] were an independent label, we got signed to them, they're hardcore businesspeople, know how to make money very well, and proceeded with that course. We were fuel that lit the fire. Once our candle was used up as far as they was concerned they weren't interested in our new special extremely lovely fuel. They were sorted out... bosh. That happens to loads of people. You're a commodity. They were then bought by Polygram, and then the whole major label syndrome started kicking in, then we were bought out by Arista, and they continued with the same sort of stupid arrangement. They're monolith dinosaur creatures that don't know how to react, a lot of them, and they're not very cool." Lots of musicians don't survive this kind of situation, but Coldcut did, demonstrating the streak of determination that's brought them to where they are now. Jonathan: "It was a psychic fight, and a lot of the reason Coldcut were quiet for quite a long time. But I'm a stubborn bastard, and I wasn't gonna let it stop us."

"We could just say that we had a period of pop success where we could make some money, which fuelled us to start Ninja Tune, but it was a lot more messy than that", adds Matt. "We nearly lost it. A lot of other people don't make it; they come up innocent, full of love and ideas, and just get trommelled, never heard of again."

"It's a polishing machine, the industry", comments Jonathan. "You put all the stones in, and some of them look wicked when you pick them up off the beach because they're all rough, but they've got a texture that's really beautiful. Stick them all in the polishing machine and those aren't necessarily the ones that come out looking the best... some people don't like the rough edges taken off, and that's us, to a certain extent."

Which all explains Infobone's exhortation to "help render redundant the feeble, cash‑bloated efforts of the grey face con majors." And elsewhere: "With increasing speed THEY seem able to zero in on new underground hybrids, capitalise, sterilise, and yet there is a way to kill these muthafuckers, because as fast as they suck, new forms spring up. Speed that up. Stop buying stuff and start making it — yourselves — with love — with fun. Overwhelm the Con with quantities of the qualities they don't understand. Let the people create. Let us Play." It's a stirring message, but begs the question of whether it isn't just human nature to see a new trend and to want to copy it. Matt: "It's possibly an unfortunate tendency, but maybe that's the way things are. In every flock of 100 sheep, there's one black sheep that's gonna go in the opposite direction. And it's those black sheep that are gonna — let's mix the metaphor! — lay the seeds of the next interesting‑shaped plant. If more people were playing with the music rather than just playing the music, that would be progress. It does seem that certain people want to play with the music, because of the large number of DJs there are..." Jonathan joins in: "That's why we've done those two things on the CD ROM — Playtime and My Little FunKit. The immediacy of My Little FunKit is very attractive to a lot of people right away, because it's very easy to use, and easy to get results, which is something that Matt and I wanted, because we're into things that do that. Playtime is quite a lot deeper; you don't really know whether you're having an effect or not, but it does make some of the most outrageous patterns that you're likely to be able to get out of anything at the moment.

"We'd like people to take those and do things with them, and if they send them to us and they're brilliant, we'll put them out. In a way, it's a development of DJ Food and the breakbeat DJ culture of providing pieces for people to do their own thing, and it is a hip‑hop attitude. Hip‑hop has had a thing about being educational, edutainment; it's supposed to have that sort of vibe... the real hip‑hop, I'm talking about, not the R&B sell‑out."

The Play's The Thing

Musically, Let Us Play is an absorbing listen, beautifully crafted and with much lounge‑flavoured melodic interest. More than a few tracks were derived from jam sessions set up by Coldcut between themselves and selected 'real' musicians, and the watermark of this sophisticated method is audible throughout the album. Jonathan: "With the whole album we wanted to get away from one bloke or bird at a computer sequencer, with a load of people standing around going "yeah, that's nice" or "why don't you make the snare a bit louder?". When you work with your computer, it's very easy to become insular, and that leads to a lot of linear music. Club music is about linearity in a way, but it's also about light and shade and variety." Matt: "In a way, it was an attempt to escape from the sampler/sequencer dead end, which we've been doing for quite a few years now, as have a lot of other people. It's fantastic to be able to do a whole orchestration on a sequencer with one person. But if you're more than one person working, it can be very frustrating, and you tend to find that you work in four‑bar sections, and tracks can end up with too much similarity. On the album, there's quite a lot of different approaches, because we were frustrated with the limitations of the sampler/sequencer setup."

The pair clearly feel that the mature elegance of Let Us Play is the culmination of a long process of musical and personal development for Coldcut. When asked how long the album took to produce, Jonathan responds immediately: "10 years! It's taken us 10 years, probably longer." Matt agrees: "It's taken 10 years, we feel, to charge up the ideas battery to the point where we've got enough stuff to blow people's heads. We think we've only just begun, really. This is the first album we've made that we're at all happy with. Though already we're perhaps critical of some of the flaws..." Jonathan interjects: "But not as much as we were with the others. There are no tracks on there that are a compromise, whereas there were tracks on our first album..." ...which were a compromise? Jonathan: "Well, just because the polishing machine had started to get into gear..." Matt: "Listening to other people who we shouldn't be listening to..." "...and taking advice from advisors who were false. This is pure", adds Jonathan. Matt continues: "We can't blame anyone else, one way or another. There's a diversity of stuff there which gives it strength; we've got a lot of people involved, and our skill has perhaps been as much in finding people and learning to work with them, and putting a thing together where people aren't continually arguing or pissed off with each other."

Putting people together is a bit of a Coldcut speciality. Legendary drummer Bernard Purdie, for example, appears on 'Rubaiyat', a track which originated from jams and was then "heavily deconstructed." Jonathan: "We went into a 24‑track studio [Milo's, Hoxton Square] with Jamie Odell and Cheyne Towers from Jimpster, and some friends of ours. It was quite odd for us. I felt quite uneasy, because I've always been used to being behind the desk. I found it an interesting experience, and exciting as well. We just jammed. 'What's the tempo?' was the only sort of discussion about the track. We jammed about nine numbers."

Matt: "When you've got someone like Bernard Purdie leading things, it's not really a problem to get something going. We did seven tracks in two days, all 15 minutes long, and they could be labelled as totally self‑indulgent jazz‑funk masturbation, with some DJ touches, but we got enough material to mangle stuff out of."

Jonathan: "Then we sent that stuff up to Jamie Odell, who programmed, sampled and worked on it, and sent it back to us. We put it into the digital suite and fucked it some more, put some vocals on it. Same with the Steinski track; again it was another one of the jams. We sent it over to him and he sorted it out over there with the vocals and shit, and sent it back to us."

It seems Coldcut have come full circle: their inspiration of the '80s, Steinski, is credited with 'additional production' on 'I'm Wild About That Thing'. The pair are obviously delighted to have been able to involve their mentor. Jonathan: "We've known him for ages, ever since we were introduced to him at a party in about 1989. He's the boss." Matt leaps in: "We've long worshipped him as an older brother, and we were lucky enough to strike up quite a close relationship. But he's giving us props for kicking his butt to get back into making some music. When we saw him recently in New York, he was working on some new stuff." It's that Coldcut catalyst factor kicking in again... Matt: "It's decent to know that we're down with Stein, who inspired us in the first place, and that some of what we're doing is keeping him into the music. We're quite parallel characters in some way, but he wasn't able to take advantage of the pop mechanics like we were. He was too ahead of his time, basically... There's no point being too ahead of your time or people don't know what the fuck you're going on about. You have to be just a little bit ahead, and keep running."

Other tracks on Let Us Play are the result of collaborations with less famous but just as worthy co‑conspirators. The haunting, witty 'Panopticon' reveals Coldcut in political mood and working with environmental activist Bongo. (Jonathan: "A lot of people say you should be apolitical, but I say be political. Whatever you do, from the minute you're born, you're political.")

Matt: "I was working with Bongo, who's a good friend of mine; she's an ambient activist, who was very involved with the protests at Claremont Road [against the East London M11 motorway extension] and Non Violent Direct Action. She's also a very good ambient DJ, and started to make her own music, started collecting bits of stuff on Walkman and off videos relating to her experiences, especially the road stuff — that's where the vocal samples came from. We wanted to do a video for it. Bongo said a lot of the samples came from Undercurrents, an underground video magazine. We found that the guy who shot that was living in the same house as our engineer Alistair, so we got in contact with him and asked him if he'd make a promo reuniting the original video footage that the samples were taken from with the audio samples. I think it's a good track because it's got soul; if you see the video, it's just pure raw real experience." The track, which you can check out with accompanying video on the Let Us Play CD‑ROM, has a very palpable atmosphere, contributed partly by the intriguing snatches of speech, some of which, in particular an anguished female vocal snippet, have been tailored to complement the backing track perfectly. Jonathan comments: "We tuned her in places. You get a phrase, and it takes a bit of work to sit in the track." Matt: "A lot is tuning... It's great, that feeling of whacking a sample in there and finding it works, but invention is 99 per cent perspiration, so it's worth giving it that extra time sometimes. It's amazing how much your head puts into stuff. It's funny how much a sample sounds good, and you can move it, and it can sound equally as good on another beat, because your head starts hearing the two things and drawing conclusions."

The pair have obviously put "that extra time" into Let Us Play, whose disparate elements sound as though they were born to be together. Jonathan: "With some of the tracks, like 'Return to Margin', there was so much going on that it needed to be carefully 'tamped down' as I put it... It just takes a lot of time." Matt: "Let's face it, there was a pretty anal approach to polishing and burnishing and getting it right on this album; it's taken quite a while." Jonathan: "We don't use a lot of reverbs, the tracks are quite dry. We tend to write a lot of the tracks mono, flat, then when we go to a studio that's got a lot of ability to patch things up, that's when we start kind of stretching it. I don't like loads of reverb, because it can tend to make sample‑based music, or music that's got reverb in the sounds already, sound shit. A lot of outboard gear comes with reverbs in it, and people just don't switch them off, which is why it sounds all the same. If you switch it off and use something else, you can get an entirely different sound. Switch your reverb off and try some other things, and you might find some interesting results."

Nature Of Sound

For two such seasoned sample gatherers as More and Black, the nature of sound is obviously very important — perhaps more important than the melodic content of a track? Jonathan demurs: "No, I like melodic shit, but I don't like to overstate it; it's pretty easy to ram it into peoples' faces. I like melodies, they come out of weird shit. Like on 'Return to Margin', there was a loop of electronic blips which we cut up and looped, and I could hear this melody. Eventually we worked it out, and that became the vibes melody. It was in the loop, possibly just in my head, because nobody else could hear it." Matt: "That's an example of the sort of interference effect that you get if you've got two things playing: the two waves start interfering with each other, and they actually generate from that some kind of offspring vibrations, which might actually be quite subjective in the way that you perceive them, but are there.

"I think the main difference between the kind of music we're talking about and 'rock' is that we're more interested in sounds. I was watching Glastonbury, checking out the endless succession of blokes with guitars, and the kind of droning insistence of what they were doing didn't touch me at all. After a while it occurred to me that it was because the sound isn't interesting — it doesn't change. If you've got incredible dynamics in a vocal or an incredible performer or incredible lyrics, that can compensate to a certain extent, but when it's the guitar, the bass and the drums just grinding on... Yeah, it's a wall of sound, but it's a pretty fucking..." "boring, whitewashed breezeblock kind of vibe..." adds Jonathan. Matt continues: "Yeah, it's not inspiring you to look over the other side of it. Our music, dance music and all these abstract musics — which should be called digital because it's all made with MIDI — they're much more about interesting sounds and level of sounds and textures, and using voices as textures. That's the main difference, and it's why I think rock isn't doing it."

Ninja Gear

Alongside the sprawling Ninja Tune office is a small studio where Black and More record their Kiss FM radio show and do some of their album work. It's recently undergone some changes, becoming rather more complex and certainly more up to date. Matt: "We're actually — shouldn't admit this, really — in the quite sad position that our studio is so complicated that Jon or I cannot actually turn it on and guarantee it will work and know how to fix it if it's not working. So we have an engineer, who's very knowledgeable, to sort those things out."

One of the most significant changes has been a move away from the Atari ST running C‑Lab's venerable Creator, though both insist that they still like the Atari/C‑Lab setup and find it very fast to use. Nevertheless, times change. Matt: "We abandoned that near the beginning of the album, and moved to [Opcode's] Studio Vision on the Mac." Jonathan: "Still trying to learn how to use it... We made a decision before we started the album to go a bit further with the gear. Up until that point, we pretty much had some outboard, Akai S3000 and the Atari running Creator. We'd also got some old Syquest drive for samples, which is pretty clumsy, and we built up this enormous shelf of Syquests, which was getting ludicrous. Now you've got Zips for no money down and about eight times the capacity of our ancient device, and very quick, so we moved onto that. We did that at the same time as trying to do the album, so it has been a bit of a nightmare trying to cross over. We've gone from a position of quite ignorant gear that was dead easy to control, to a position of lots more ability to do things but a lot more ability to get it wrong, badly..."

Matt: "We're sorting our library out at the moment: we've got about 14,000 samples on about 4Gb of hard disk, which we're trying to arrange into categories. How does one arrange 800 phrases, some of which are just one word, some of which are lengthy rants? We've come up with categories. The guys who don't want to be labelled are trying to label their sample collection... It'll pay off in the end, because we're going to cut it back onto CD and make it accessible to the Mac and the Akai."

The aforementioned Akai is a 32Mb S3000 (Jonathan: "still pretty decent for a lot of things"), which is still undertaking sampling duties, though the audio side of Vision also provides extra recording capacity, as does "a Newmark DJ mixer which has got a little four‑second sampler on it." Synths don't figure large in the Coldcut scheme of things; when asked if there are any synths he wouldn't like to do without, Jonathan responds that "I could do without them, I suppose. We used a Korg Wavestation — not ours — on the album. It's got some quite nice sounds, and it has the wave sequencing function, which we used for 'Music For No Musicians', but I'd be quite happy to live without it. I haven't rushed out and bought one. We've got a Waldorf MicroWave, plus programmer jobby. It's alright, got some good basses, but, funnily enough, we hardly used it for this album. There's Matt's big Korg modular, which came in in some places, and there's the Roland JD800. Even though I'm getting pretty bored with it, you can still surprise yourself by frigging the knobs until you get a decent sound out of it. Just get hold of it and do it. I hate things that are complicated. I just want some sounds, and I want them now."

At this point Jonathan leaps to his feet and reveals the reason for the presence in the room of a pink plastic Sindy disco which we had assumed was just part of the Ninja decor. Firmly fixed to Sindy's dancefloor is a miniature console with buttons which trigger preposterous but interesting booming and distorted drum patterns, obviously sampled into about 3K of RAM chip at a sample rate of half a kHz. Jonathan: "I love it. I use whatever comes to hand. I like things that are straightforward like that." With childlike enthusiasm he grabs a see‑through glitter plastic device and begins triggering another set of Taiwanese kiddy‑grooves. Evidently, it's all there to be used...

Back in serious studio‑land, the outboard rack is pretty well stocked (see the 'Gear List' box elsewhere in this article) with effects and processing units, including a Boss SE50 and "an old Maxim delay which is pretty outrageous. We're buying loads of gear at the moment. There's a TC Finaliser, which we used quite a lot on the album. We recorded vocals into Vision and used the Finaliser to sort out compression. We actually record vocals onto ADAT first, then into Vision. We do quite a lot of work with ADAT.

"We've also got a Peavey thingy that does all the MIDI data with sliders, a PC1600, which is quite a laugh. We also used that on 'Music for No Musicians'. We set all the filters and everything on the S3000 and just play the PC1600, then had another bank, which was the volumes. We did the filters and recorded all those in, then did all the volumes and put those in. We just jammed several times with that track live, as it were, back into the sequencer, and recorded loads of information, and where we didn't like it, we just dropped out and dropped back in again."

Looking around the room, we spot the distinctive 'Darth Vader's frisbee' shape of the Notron sequencer. Matt opines that it is "Totally wicked, serial number 1. We'll get some value out of it sooner or later. The couple of times I've played with it, I've had a wicked time. I'm really into alternative performance input devices."

Tea, Boys?

The interview winds up as the record label bosses for the millennium make it known that they're keen to get on with business. As we prepare to leave they're diving back into Ninja work mode, Matt in keen consultation in front of a video screen, and Jonathan catching up on some phone calls. Earlier, impressed to hear that they obtain sample clearance personally, we'd asked the pair if they do everything themselves. Matt: "We don't make our own sandwiches". Jonathan: "We sometimes make the tea."